Josh walked away from the building more slowly than usual. He stood for a moment on Pennsylvania Avenue and looked back at it: the clean white facade, the neoclassical architecture which (he remembered being told by someone, somewhere) had been chosen for this building for the same reasons it had been so beloved by the Founding Fathers in all their homes, because its regular geometry represented to them balance and order, the rule of principle and law—the same qualities they had embedded in the Constitution when they chose to make their new country a nation governed by laws, not by men.
He looked at the flag flying high on the flagstaff over the front doors, and felt that surge of pride he always felt whenever he really noticed it—a pride he'd always been too embarrassed to admit to, but couldn't deny to himself. It was, to him, simply the most beautiful flag in the world, with its crisp red and white stripes and its bold blue field spangled so brilliantly with little white stars. A star for each state, including the one he still thought of as his, Connecticut. And one of those stripes was Connecticut's, too. As a boy he'd always liked the fact that his state was one of the original thirteen, rich in the history of the colonies and the Revolution, entitled to its own stripe on the flag. Connecticut settlers were the first to draw up a constitution to govern themselves by, the precursor to all the others, including the great, unifying one that was lying even now in its vault in the Archives building just up the Mall. They'd been told about that endlessly in school, along with all the other things Connecticut colonists had done. The statue of the Minuteman that stood on CompoBeach in Westport had been part of the backdrop of his childhood, a constant reminder both of his state's proud history and of the vigilance and sacrifice that had been required to create a nation and pass it on to others.
Vigilance, and sacrifice. Josh turned and walked slowly down 15th Street, past the Ellipse to Constitution Avenue—there was no escaping that word in this city—and the Mall. Ahead of him stood the WashingtonMonument on its grassy knoll, its circle of flags flapping around it, more red, white, and blue. He was struck by the absence of people around it. Usually there was a long line of tourists waiting to get in, and families playing ball or flying kites on the lawn at its base, but since the attacks the Monument had been closed, and the presence of concrete bunkers and armed guards no doubt discouraged parents from wanting to bring their children to play near it, even where the park was still open. It was one of the discouraging signs of the times they were living in—the times he and Donna were about to bring a child into.
Josh turned away from the Monument and began to walk, still slowly, westwards. He didn't go down to the Reflecting Pool but stayed on the path that led around the little lake to the north of it. There were families here, as there always were, children eating ice-cream and feeding ducks and sailing toy boats on the water. Josh stood for a while, watching them, his heart pounding in his throat, and thought again about what Donna had told him last night. They were going to have a child; he was going to be a father.
He wanted it desperately. He wanted to hold his baby. He wanted to give him his bottle when Donna needed a break from nursing, change her diapers, walk with him on his shoulder patting his back and saying soothing things to him when he was crying in the night. He wanted to see his baby growing up and taking her first steps. He wanted to see his child climbing in the apple trees, running through the garden, reading in front of the fireplace where he and his sister had climbed and run and read in the house in Connecticut. He wanted to bring his child here and buy her ice-cream. Help him feed ducks. Teach her how to throw a ball. Show him how to sail a toy boat. He wanted to take her up the Washington Monument and tell her about this city and what he'd done there; show him the Capitol, take him around the White House, talk about how his mother and his father had worked to make laws that would make the country he was growing up in a better place. Watching the children playing there by the water on that sunny afternoon, a stone's throw from the grand buildings he'd worked so hard in, Josh had never wanted fatherhood so badly. And he could have it. If he just went home now, he could have it. If he just went quietly home to Donna, who was pregnant with his baby, it would be his.
He turned away from the children and kept walking. The path curved around, and the low black wall began to rise beside it—the wall with the names carved on it of all the men and women who'd died in the war when he was young. The wall whose surface was polished and gleaming so you could see your own face reflected there, and the faces of everyone who'd come to look and maybe find a name they knew, the name of someone who'd belonged to them. Brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives—every name represented someone who had been someone else's everything. Just as he was to Donna and would be to that baby. Just as Donna and that baby were to him.
It had been a bad war. Every name on that wall seemed to him a tragedy, lost not in the struggle for something good or great but just because their country's leaders had been too misguided, too arrogant, too proud, perhaps too fearful to say no and put a stop to it. Democrats, too—it was Johnson who had committed Americans to that war, Johnson and even Kennedy; one couldn't lay all the blame on Nixon, much though Josh would have liked to. Wasted lives, wasted promise. One had to be sure that what one was fighting for was the real thing. But one also had to make sure that no more brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives had to die that way.
He followed the path past the end of the wall and the statues of the soldiers and on to the end of the Reflecting Pool, then crossed the road and walked slowly up the steps to the Lincoln Memorial. He stood there as he'd often done before, looking up at the great statue of the great man, with his wise eyes and careworn face, and at the inspiring words carved in the walls around him. He thought about the war Lincoln had fought and the men who had fought and died in it to preserve a nation and to extend the promise of its freedoms, if not fully to everyone who lived in it, at least more fully to more of them.
Josh was under no illusions about the absolute success of that war or the absolute purity of Lincoln's motives for fighting it, just as he was under no illusions about the perfection of the Constitution that had, for the nation's first century, permitted slavery and denied citizenship to anyone but white men—but he'd always believed that, without the ideals expressed in Lincoln's words and in that Constitution, there would be no nation worth living in today. There would have been no union for anyone to fight to save, and slavery would have continued indefinitely—some version of it would still be continuing, perhaps. You had to have it—you had to have a document like that to base yourself on, or you had nothing. You had to have a rule of law, not of men; men became slave-owners and tyrants too easily.
He'd always wondered why most Americans felt so complacent about their leaders, so indifferent when they went to the voting booth to anything but their own immediate personal likes and dislikes, or their own immediate financial loss or gain. Most of them never seemed to stop and consider the bigger picture, to think that it was only a step or two from electing the wrong man for the wrong reasons to following him into the invasion of a Poland or a Netherlands and suffering the horrors of a war that ended with the bombing of a Dresden or Koln. Following him into the bloodshed of a Krystalnacht and becoming the keepers or the inmates of a Treblinka, a Birchenau, a Dachau. Maybe it was Josh's own family history that made it seem so essential to him that the man or woman elected to a position as powerful as the United States Presidency truly be the real thing, someone able to stand up under the responsibilities and temptations of the office, someone worthy to be called, however archaically, the Leader of the Free World.
Freedom. What was it, if not the right to live securely in a country governed by laws, not by men? Not to be sent to war without good cause. Not to have one's children sent to war without good—without very good, without excellent—cause. Not to have one's privacy invaded without reasonable cause and due process; not to be subject—no matter who you were, no matter what you might have done—to being whisked away without legal representation, a legal charge and a fair and legal trial.
Josh had never practiced as a lawyer, but he held his Yale degree and his place at the bar dear. Getting it hadn't been just a means to an end for him, a stepping-stone into politics, although it was partly that: the language of law, the principles of it had been deeply embedded in him since his childhood. He had learned to respect them at the family dinner table, at his father's knee. He'd come close to compromising the Constitution once or twice himself in his eagerness to secure a win, but he'd never done it deliberately and never would. He still remembered the sting of President Bartlet's rebuke to him over that once, gentle though it had been. That was why you needed a man of Bartlet's stature in that office: if even he, Josh Lyman, with all his intellectual abilities and experience and devotion to ideals could come close at times to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to giving away the Bill of Rights for the sake of political gain, then he didn't trust many people to do much better.
But they didn't have a Bartlet anymore. They didn't have a Matt Santos. They didn't have an Arnold Vinick. They had Bob Russell. Or Bob Russell and Harold Porter, who had just made his willingness to compromise almost anything extremely plain.
Josh turned around. At the foot of the steps he could see a little family, a small girl and her smaller brother poking with sticks in the tranquil waters of the Reflecting Pool while their mother and father looked on, laughing. The mother was slim, with long blonde hair. Behind them the Monument and the Capitol were lined up like a shot for a postcard, their flags flying proudly, red, white and blue. The sun was bright in his eyes, which might have been what made them water. He rubbed his hand across them, then started down the stairs. His pace quickened as he moved, until he was jogging. He shouldn't have taken so long; he might not have much time.
Back at the street he flagged down a taxi and got in. "The Hill," he said. He took his cell phone out and opened it, wanting to call Donna and tell her what he was doing and why, wanting just to hear her voice again. But calls could be traced, or listened in on. There were chances he was willing to take, and ones he wasn't—Porter obviously hadn't known that Donna was involved with him, and he wanted to keep it that way. He fingered the phone for a minute, then closed it and put it down beside him. He looked out the window all the way to the Capitol, watching the children playing on the Mall.
oooooo
"Harold, this is Congressman Schaeffer."
"Yes, Congressman?"
"He's back."
"Damn it. Has he been there long?"
"I'm not sure. I've been in a meeting. A couple of hours, maybe more."
"Who's he seen?"
"Redford, Campbell, Thompson, Banks—probably others, I'm not sure."
"Fuck."
"I thought you'd want to know."
"Yes, I do. Thank you, Congressman."
"Not at all. Anything to help the President."
"Thank you. He won't forget it."
oooooo
"Department of Defense. Secretary Patrick Swayne's office."
"It's Harold Porter, Susan. I need to speak to the Secretary."
"I'll put you right through, sir."
oooooo
"Mr. President?"
"Yes, Pat?"
"We've got a Code Red situation on the Hill, sir."
"Code Red?"
"Yes, sir."
"What do I do?"
"I just need your authority to start the response, sir."
"Take whatever steps are necessary, Mr. Secretary. You have my full authority."
"Yes, Mr. President. I'll do that right away."
oooooo
"Captain Newart?"
"Yes, Mr. Secretary."
"We have a Code Red situation up there. Begin the response immediately."
"Yes, sir. Do we have any information, sir? Who we're looking for, anything like that?"
"I've sent several of my men up; they should be arriving now. They know all the details."
"Yes, sir. I should begin now, sir?"
"Now, Captain Newart."
"Yes, sir."
oooooo
Josh walked out of Rep. Finnegan's office on the balls of his feet. He was beginning to think he was getting somewhere with this. Apparently Bekker had been more impressed than he'd seemed this morning, and had been making some calls while Josh was tied up at the White House. Finnegan had already heard the story, and was up in arms. She was going to talk to Clifford, Jaffe and Filurski, while Bekker worked more of his circle of friends and allies. Josh had several more names he urgently wanted to talk to himself, but he had a chance now of alerting enough people by this evening that the White House would face a serious challenge on the floor.
He walked down the long hallway, fast, as always. There was a group of tourists hovering with a guide at the end of the hall.
"Now, this mural by Allyn Cox shows the Constitutional Congress of 1787," the woman was saying in a clear, carrying voice. "They're meeting in Benjamin Franklin's garden, working on the United States Constitution and creating the system of checks and balances which, as you know, was designed to guard against tyranny and which still exists today. The panel on the right shows a colonist barring his door, symbolizing the desire for freedom from unreasonable search and seizure which was eventually addressed in the Fourteenth Amendment."
"Why did they wait that long?" a man in her group asked, when an alarm began to ring and the P.A. system crackled into life.
"Red Alert, Red Alert. We have a terrorist Red Alert. Everyone should leave the building at once. This is not a drill. Walk, do not run to the nearest exit. I repeat, this is NOT a drill. We have a terrorist Red Alert."
The tourists screamed. Doors started to open all around Josh, and people began to pour out and down the hall, everyone talking, their voices and the tourists' screams and the sounds of their hurrying feet all echoing noisily through the marble halls. Uniformed Capitol Police were suddenly everywhere. Josh started to head towards the exit when four large men in sunglasses and dark suits appeared around him.
"You're coming with us," one of them said, taking his arm and giving him a shove.
"Thought you could get away with it, did you?" said one of the others, grabbing him from the other side, hard.
"You can't do this," Josh said, loudly, "I haven't done anything," but his protests were drowned out by the noise all around him. The four men pushed Josh through the door and down the great stone stairs at the back of the building to the Mall. He had a fleeting impression of the flag waving against the blue sky and children playing on the green grass before he was dragged into a car that pulled suddenly up on the footpath beside them, and then, screeching its tires, drove away.
oooooo